In Pakistan, lockdown eases - fear doesn't.

Byline: Fahd Husain

ISLAMABAD -- As the coronavirus-related lockdown eases in the country from Saturday (today), the federal government feels cautiously confident its data-driven decision will succeed in striking a delicate balance between lives and livelihood.

What are the grounds for this measured assurance?

Detailed conversations with key stakeholders and officials reveal a picture that is patterned on an interplay of data and policy and their cross-pollination that generates interpretation. This design forms the basis of conclusions drawn by experts and government officials which in turn have directly fed into the final decision by Prime Minister Imran Khan.

Officials are quick to admit however that the decision to ease the lockdown from today carries an element of risk. 'We can only project trends two weeks ahead with reasonable confidence,' says a key expert involved in decision-making at the federal level. 'Beyond that is conjecture.'

Governments do not make policy on conjecture. The decision to open up the country gradually while the infection rate continues to spike daily has generated a debate that is laced with unease and fears for the worst. This debate centres on a key question: Is data driving policy, or policy driving data?

Enter the NCOC.

At the National Command and Operations Centre (NCOC), ministers, doctors and generals pored over data every single day as it poured in from all corners of the country. The quantity and quality of this data improved with each passing week and enabled the men and women in the NCOC to extrapolate trends and projections with a greater degree of clarity. This clarity was peppered with a dose of reality: the federal and provincial governments were testing far less than was required. 'We recognised this was our weakness,' says Dr Faisal Sultan, Prime Minister's Focal Person on Covid-19.

Since the prime minister tasked him away from his day job as the CEO of Shaukat Khanum Memorial Hospital and brought him to Islamabad to coordinate the effort against Covid-19, Dr Faisal - who looks younger than his 57 - has been the key policy driver in collating, processing and analysing data. Dr Faisal has been a vocal and engaged presence at the NCOC meetings and in many respects the resident expert who breaks down dense data for the non-medical politicians and military officers gathered around the long and shiny table inside the operations centre.

Today he defends the easing of the lockdown with arguments that...